Organizations rely on IT services to support business requirements. Failure to meet service levels due to system or server downtime can translate into a potential for lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and a competitive disadvantage. Operations management systems help IT administrators maintain system availability and service performance requirements by reducing the complexity typically associated with managing today's scalable server IT infrastructure environments. For instance, operations management systems directly monitor infrastructure events, health, and performance, and provide this information to operations team members. This information along with diagnostic tools, typically provided by management pack(s) and/or operations playbooks, allow operations team members (e.g., administrators and operators) to diagnose and resolve issues that arise. Management packs generally include operational knowledge to manage applications. Third parties such as the application developers typically provide operational knowledge. The operational knowledge encapsulates the knowledge, experience, and suggested practices to keep these applications operational. For example, operational knowledge associated with an alert may provide a summary of a recognized problem, cause(s) of the problem, and suggested resolution(s).
Independent of a management pack, an operations team, based on their collective experience, may generate an operations playbook (“playbook”). A playbook typically includes one or more resources such as descriptions of how one would manually run a task using a script or a command line, how to use performance monitoring tools, a reporting tool (e.g., state, diagram, alert, performance, event, computer and group views), etc.), and/or specify links for additional resources. Since playbooks are independent of management packs, playbooks cannot used in context of the operational knowledge provided by a developer of the application or by a system vendor for the application. Moreover, playbooks are not integrated into an operations management system such as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), or the like.